Animation in combat

So, in the nearest patch a full animation synchronization in combat will be done. In other words, one of the things will be fixed that many of our players pointed out to us in the early stages of development.

Realistically, the animation in combat is ready for the game in the framework of the current combat algorithm, and if new movements or actions will be added, syncing will have to be done again.

What were the issues with animation sync in combat? A partial answer you already heard and the rest comes from the way the combat system works. AI calculates ahead a turn and block of tracking the combat flow reconstructs the sequence of the events happened and forms asynchronous sequence of animations sets.

Health bars are text strings with numbers and text that fly up over the heads of characters whey they receive damage. They are red in the game directly from the AI so a turn in combat happens in the AI much earlier than its animation. As a result, players saw unexpected reduction of HP before it happened on the screen. With the next patch animation synchronization issues will be fixed. And health bars will change too and display changes of information better.

Floating notifications over health bar are available only in Russian now, but it will be fixed in the next patch.

Special effects

The special effects system is done, but not included into the game yet. It is mostly because that now there is no sense to make it work. SFX system will not enter into the game such parameters as Bloom, SSAO, DOF, Motion blur. And bright sparks, lightnings and thick smoke already belongs to work of graphics and animation designers. In the developers version our technical director Nikolay Armonik will show our art director Dmitry Goncharov how this wonder of technologies work, will tell about possibilities of the system and will provide examples. And only then the work on the corresponding content will start. We were getting ready for this step for a very long time and finally we got really close.

Changels in balance of healing cost. Lower level characters now are less expensive to heal, but with each level of a character the cost will grow more significantly than earlier;

Lowered the amount of gold loot when defeating “noble” characters and rogues. Loot from recruits and simple soldiers is increased a little.

Cost of trophies is a bit lowered;

Now Berthold’s army is respawned when accidentally killed in the Way Home scenario;

All final bosses are made stronger.

]]>http://aterdux.com/patch-notes-0-933-belarusian-language-added/feed/0We will be on the road againhttp://aterdux.com/we-will-be-on-the-road-again/
http://aterdux.com/we-will-be-on-the-road-again/#commentsThu, 12 Feb 2015 17:12:09 +0000http://aterdux.com/?p=2162

Plans for the near future

Remember how we said we were looking for an additional budget for marketing and PR? We found it! And that allows us to go GDC and PAX East, it wouldn’t be possible without these extra funds.

This news becomes even more interesting since Legends of Eisenwald was selected as one of 15 games to be shown in Indie Megabooth at GDC in San Francisco! We are very happy about it and looking forward to this expo. Last year’s GDC didn’t work for us but we are hoping that being a part of the great Indie Megabooth will change a few things.

Also, we will be showing Legends of Eisenwald at PAX East in Boston. There will be just two of us there and maybe someone will join us in exchange for tickets to the expo, and we already asked our Kickstarter backers.

Results of a poll which hero you find the most interesting

Quite a bit of time passed since the poll and now we would like to share its results with you. In the Russian version of the poll took part 204 participants, 163 in English

We are happy to report about new patch to Legends of Eisenwald. Traditionally we leave out a bigger part of the changes so we don’t give spoilers to those who are waiting for the release.

Сommon:

New achievements have been added, 44 in total now, out of them 16 are in the first three available chapters of the campaign.

According to the changes in the system of connecting game items and characters, all named characters were changed in all scenarios;

Increased font size in information windows of buildings and armies;

Beggars got back their clubs instead of hammers;

The income hint describes only the current amount of gold in the building treasury when gold is collected manually;

Information window of buildings has now a new icon that specifies if a building provides income. In a hint for this icon the maximal value and current controlled building is shown;

In the information window of characters abilities and combat effects now are shown separetely. Now all the effects received in a battle are displayed on a portrait of the character which should help to understand more what’s happening in combat;

New developers console is added and basic functions are working now;

Almost fully rewrote block of managing the saves. Saving will be significantly faster;

We made some funny horses (finished assembly of physical shaders).

Game mechanics:

Finished system of manual collecting gold from the castle treasuries. Now to collect gold from castles you will have to visit them. It’s important to now that tribute from the villages connected to the castle is collected by the castle court. The treasury of a castle has an upper limit, when it’s reached the gold stops being collected. Now it’s 10 times the castle income;

The bug with exchange of characters in a garrison and army of AI that lead to crashes is fixed;

Fixed mass healing for characters with negative will. Now they are simply not healed instead of receiving damage;

Spiritual power expenditure for mass spelss now does not depend on the will of a “main” target.

Priests spell Redemption removes now not only effects of negative spells but also fear, stun, poisoning and paralyzation;

Editor:

The window of scenario settings parameters is changed;

Now you can connect to a scenario a picture and coat of arms on the map;

We are happy to tell you that closed beta test in English is starting! The entire game content was translated into English and now it’s the time to see if the game can be played to the end. We won’t repeat everything what was said earlier but we recommend to re-read our post BETA WITHIN A BETA to understand what help we are looking for in this test.

You still have the time to join the volunteers of the closed beta test. Follow this links and leave your request in the form it is suggested in this topic

How to get to closed beta test (CBT)

Access to CBT is open to those participants who already have Legends of Eisenwald in their library and who have an open Steam profile.

Access to CBT will get only those participants who will agree to our NDA that is located in a special group created for CBT – EisenwaldCBT where you will be invited to shortly. To agree to NDA you have send an email with the copied text of NDA and sign it with your legal name and mailing address to shagrost.pr@aterdux.com

Collection of statistics

During the beta test we will be looking at your messages in the English part of the CBT forum but when you will finish the game once or more times, we will ask you to send us statistics files together with the saves files at the end of the game.

Also, we would like to point out that any found bugs need to be reported together with games saves and sent to devs@aterdux.com

Recently players asked us how many man-hours we spent working on the game balance. The question seemed interesting and we tried our best to work out an estimate. In the end, it’s pretty hard to even find a close approximate. All members of our small team work on multiple tasks and it’s pretty difficult to pinpoint the hours spent in any one thing. Problems are solved as they appear and at other times we work on our specific tasks. As an approximate we could say that, Dmitry Goncharov, who had to deal primarily with balancing, spent anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 hours working on it. Though it is wise to note that Dmitry didn’t think that was accurate at all! He didn’t even try to name a number and simply explained the way it works.

In the case of Legends of Eisenwald, balance includes many factors (weapons, equipment, characters, spells, and location variables) that can influence the gameplay. As soon as we were able to produce the first fight, balancing followed soon after. We didn’t do balance full time because there were many other tasks to take care of. The characteristics of characters and heroes were changed as time went by, little by little depending on their influence.

Many things in the balance turned out well and worked from the start. For instance the weapons were thought through and they didn’t change much during the development. But it’s easy to remember some changes in regards to lances and horses. In the beginning mounted units were too strong.

Changes on NPC characteristics took a lot of work, and small fixes are still being done to this day. The biggest change was done when we realized the battles started to drag on for too long. Following our main concept in battle – no extra actions and the battle should be as compact as possible – Dmitry increased the attack of all the characters by 5 points which made combat dynamic and tough. It was the result we aimed for.

Most of the work was done changing the spells. Some spells didn’t really fit thematically and ruined the common balance in Eisenwald so we had to rewrite them completely. For a long time Dmitry tried to find a balance between healers and priests since in the beginning priests seemed completely useless. As a result we found a solution – healing had to depend on willpower and the combination of a priest and a healer was now quite viable as support characters.

Weapons, equipment and amulets were not changed much and balancing was mostly done for the latest ones which were added to the game for diversity sake.

If you are interested to look at the balance correction from a technical side, our AI programmer Denis Lomako prepared a small presentation with a story of how automatic balancing was done.

One of the balancing tasks was to make weapons in the game equivalent to each other so that after few battles there would not be a clear leader among the weapons used. For this during the testing a specific part was made for a consecutive characters test. Melee fighters and ranged characters were included in the test. The test looked like this:

Four embedded loops are used: 1) on characters, 2) on weapons that these characters can use, 3) on enemy characters, 4) on weapons that the enemy uses. As a result, we get a sequence of test battles of all the characters with all of them using all available weapon types.

In a test battle each of the sides fills its army with a selected character with its selected weapon. The only difference of these characters is how initiative is set. If nothing is done, then the one army will go first with all characters and it is not fair for the test. So, the initiative of all characters is decreased by one with each turn, so characters move in turns after a certain while. For example: our character’s base initiative is 15, the enemy character’s is 12. Our first character will have 15, the second 14, the third 13 and so on. The enemy will have 12, 11, 10. So four of our characters will move before the enemy character with the initiative of 12, moves.

As a result of test, it is determined how many HP and characters are left in the victor’s army.

Receiving data is summarized according to the type of weapons and characters. They are all stored into a separate file.

We are happy to tell you that only one large step remains until the game is released because Legends of Eisenwald receive a patch version 0.99. Below is the list of changes in the game. And like we did often recently, the bigger part of the changes concerns the closed beta test and we publish only things concerning the version available for everyone without spoilers:

Added achievements. For now, only six related to the story, other ones will be added as they are ready;

Fixed the bug with “Feline mirror” when it was impossible to find it if you give the merchant the stones he requested;

The Hohenkiefer garrison is made stronger in the chapter Run Away;

Added the map marker in the note about Swallow Tower in the chapter Run Away;

Few landscape changes in the chapter Windfeld;

Wine adds now +2 will power as an additional effect, and strong wine adds now +5 to will power instead of the attack;

Garrisons of main fractions castles in Windfeld have been a bit reinforiced;

Added correct recalculation of the mounted units characteristics after defeating the only enemy next to them. Without it, when trying to apply spell, along with the standard effect “change” of their attack was displayed;

For baroness made correct result’s display of the talant “Aimed shot”;

For a spell “Magical shield” and bonus “Demonical defense” it was done that a response strike would go not only in the front but also in the back;

Fixed changing of HP for wounded characters when after taking off and equipping again the same thing the HP fell below 0;

Fixed disappearance of the shield when removing dual hand weapons. Now shield falls into the inventory.

]]>http://aterdux.com/patch-0-99/feed/0POLL: Which hero do you prefer to play with and find the most interesting?http://aterdux.com/poll-which-hero-do-you-prefer-to-play-with-and-find-the-most-interesting/
http://aterdux.com/poll-which-hero-do-you-prefer-to-play-with-and-find-the-most-interesting/#commentsThu, 08 Jan 2015 16:01:39 +0000http://aterdux.com/?p=2111Please take part in our survey: which hero do you like the best. In the comments you can write your answer in more details, thank you!

]]>http://aterdux.com/poll-which-hero-do-you-prefer-to-play-with-and-find-the-most-interesting/feed/0Legends of Eisenwald: A year in reviewhttp://aterdux.com/legends-of-eisenwald-a-year-in-review/
http://aterdux.com/legends-of-eisenwald-a-year-in-review/#commentsTue, 30 Dec 2014 16:21:23 +0000http://aterdux.com/?p=2101

Remember, we said a year ago: “This next year (2014) will be very important for us because that’s the year when Legends of Eisenwald will be released”. Unfortunately, we were wrong once again with our estimations and we decided at about the middle of this year to not give any more exact dates or plans when we will release.

Having said all that, we have no other choice other than to release Legends of Eisenwald pretty soon. This time things look much better – the game is content ready, all eight chapters of the campaign are playable and there are currently over 20 people who finished the main story at least once in our closed beta (which is ongoing into Russian). Average playtime seems to be over 40 hours, and everyone seemed to really like the story. The English beta will be starting in about two weeks, and the signup is below.

The beginning of 2014 was good, but the more we went towards the end of the year the harder it got. Denis had heart surgery done, then crunch time to try and wrap up development, but that didn’t go according to plan. One of the reasons is the brand new UI – and while the redesign didn’t take a lot of time, the reprogramming did (the UI code is now 25% of the entire game code, and more than half of it had to be programmed anew). Closer to the end of the year the money was starting to get tight and for a moment we even considered running a 2nd Kickstarter campaign to raise some funds for marketing but decided against it. (We wouldn’t have done it without asking our backers opinion first anyway).

Why marketing? This needs a bit of an explanation.

This year of 2014 is a year where many things changed. While we were really happy with our launch on Early Access, Legends of Eisenwald was one of the last Early Access titles that got featuring on the main page. More and more games were released (in the first four months of 2014 more games were released than in the entirety of 2013). In order to attract more attention to our game we tried to participate in the summer sale but Steam didn’t get us any space on the front page. Then we were lucky to have a Daily Deal in August. We didn’t get a spot in Halloween or the Winter sale probably because our sales since the beginning of Summer were far from great. In a month or so I plan to write an article with a breakdown of our costs, units sold etc. In short, a few months at the end of 2013 and beginning of 2014 were the months we were doing alright. We didn’t raise our salaries or anything like that, but we participated in two game expos – GDC Play and Igromir – and it was a mistake.

With all these changes, we are now trying to see what else can be done for the release. And that’s why we are thinking to get some funds for marketing. One might argue that if a game is good it will find its audience and there is no need for any paid marketing activities. But right now we disagree. To show Valve our game is good, it needs to sell better in order to have some visibility at the launch and while we have good hope for our PR activities, we feel some marketing would give us a bit more. The Legends of Eisenwald release will determine the future of our company. If it goes well, we can continue working on the game and add all the nice features we wanted to have and even more. And if not, then it will be hard to predict what’s going to happen. We don’t want our game to be lost or go unnoticed. And we will use all necessary options to make our game survive.

To conclude, we wish all Happy New Year, and we will release the game as soon as we can.

Alexander and all of us at Aterdux

]]>http://aterdux.com/legends-of-eisenwald-a-year-in-review/feed/0Patch 0.987http://aterdux.com/patch-0-987/
http://aterdux.com/patch-0-987/#commentsWed, 24 Dec 2014 16:51:14 +0000http://aterdux.com/?p=2089Aterdux Team wishes you merry Christmas! We wish you to celebrate it in the company of your loved ones and friends and in the good mood.

This patch 0.987 is bringing in the full German version – all scenarios, hints and texts have been translated. The rest are bug fixes directly from the closed beta!

Changes:

Mystic has now ability to evoke spiritsl

The amulet feline mirror has been changed – now it adds to initiative and has another added bonus “Silver weapon”;

Bottles have been introduced with characteristics modifiers to be used in combat;

Fixed errors with selecting targets for melee fighters;

Fixed crash in the markets

Restored correct functioning of the author tag;

Statistics collection has been updated;

Fixed disappearance of items that must be in stores;

Light hammers now have a different 3D model;

Fixed an issue with undead armies appearing “out of nowhere”;

Evoking spirits now takes the correct amount of spiritual power;

Fixed the bug with game saves (where the last save was not available), the bug with quest journal (text in the air), and other smaller errors in the code related to saves;

Many small fixes.

This is not the entire list of fixes since other are spoilers for the closed beta.